CERN's existing underground particle accelerator, 27 kilometers in diameter, is the world's largest scientific facility. But CERN scientists are already drawing up plans for an even more gigantic circular accelerator, 80 to 100 kilometers in diameter, that would be up to seven times more powerful than the current one.
At a meeting to be held at the University of Geneva next week (February 12 to 15), according to Agence France-Presse and "Science", about 300 physicists and engineers, led by CERN's German director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer, will outline plans for the successor to the existing accelerator.
The current "Large Hadron Collider" (LHC), which was put into operation under the Franco-Swiss border in 2008 and is expected to operate until 2030, can collide protons with energies up to 7 TeV (teraelectronvolts), which will double to 14 TeV from 2015. However, its successor will be able to reach 100 TeV, an energy that will allow it to "penetrate" deeper into the secrets of matter and the universe.
"It is time to look even further into the future," said a statement from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which last year celebrated the great success of the discovery of the Higgs boson. The accelerator is currently in a shutdown phase for maintenance and upgrading, a process that will last 18 months until early 2015.
Given that such ambitious plans, such as the construction of an accelerator, require a very long time from initial conception to implementation, it was deemed appropriate to take advantage of the LHC's temporary hiatus to allow scientists to gradually clarify who will succeed the current accelerator.
So, next week will officially begin the five-year feasibility study for the (possible but not certain) creation of the so-called “Future Circular Collider” (FCC), also called “TLEP”, which will probably be located in the same area and will integrate the LHC tunnel into its much larger infrastructure, according to the CERN. In fact, the proposal is to create two accelerators in succession in the same 100 km tunnel, initially one for electron-positron collisions (TLEP) and, in a later phase, a larger one for proton collisions (FCC).
The planned giant FCC, however, has to compete with a more "mature" and cheaper alternative for creating a linear - not circular - accelerator, either the 80-kilometer-long Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) or the 31-kilometer-long International Linear Collider (ILC). The big dilemma is whether the next large accelerator will be circular or linear, and then, once that is decided, the exact design of the accelerator must be finalized.
The two feasibility studies will compare the costs and benefits of the circular and linear accelerators. The final choice is expected to be made in 2018-19, when the new European strategy in the field of particle physics will be officially outlined, certainly in consultation with the Europeans and the other countries, which are also partners of CERN.
The winner “will be a worthy successor to the LHC,” CERN , adding that the new accelerator “will allow particle physics to push the frontiers of knowledge even further.” Among other things, the goal will be to provide a definitive answer to whether the widely held (but not experimentally proven) theory of supersymmetry, according to which every subatomic particle in nature has a “mirror” (symmetric) particle, is actually valid. Future research will also focus on the mysterious “dark” matter, which is estimated to be much more abundant than conventional matter in the universe, but its existence has so far been assumed indirectly rather than by direct observations.
The original idea for the current LHC existed in the early 1980s, approval for its creation was given in the 1990s, and its construction, which was completed towards the end of the 2000s, cost around 4.1 billion euros.
Its successor will certainly take decades to complete - and the question is whether governments will provide such large sums of money, especially if public budget cuts continue. The bulk of the cost will go to the construction of the new huge underground tunnel, part of which may even lie under Lake Geneva.
News Room "Profit" with information from the APE - AMU
